Briefs

FCW.com -- BY Florence Olsen -- Oct. 11, 2004

Agriculture Department officials were alerted to more than $250 million in fraudulent crop insurance claims in the past three years after they began using data mining. Based on that initial success, officials in the USDA's Risk Management Agency are exploring additional uses of data mining for improving Federal Crop Insurance Corp. policies and procedures.

Since 2000, when lawmakers allocated $20 million for a five-year study to reduce waste, fraud and abuse in the insurance program, USDA officials have documented a better than 20 to 1 return on the $13 million they have invested in data mining. Data mining, or predictive analytics, is a statistical database technique that is useful for discovering anomalies that can be indicative of fraud.

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